358. I Could Be Happy

It’s a good thing I had that nap in the car. The wake-up call came at sixty-thirty in the morning for me, meaning I got about four hours sleep after J. and I got out of the shower. Ziggy and I went to a radio station in midtown by limousine. In the back seat I slept on his shoulder for twenty blocks. Carynne was with us. Honestly, if Digger had been there, I probably wouldn’t have stopped myself. I was too tired to care.

I don’t know what Ziggy did to wake himself up, but he was perky as hell during the interview. Maybe knowing a million people were listening was enough. Okay, not a million, but whatever. They said it was the highest rated morning show in New York, and New York was the biggest radio market, and since morning was the highest rated radio time of all, that meant this was the most people listening to a single radio broadcast you could get. Some PR rep from the record company was there at the station, too, handing off a bunch of autographed stuff. The weird part is it was stuff we had autographed previously, earlier in the week, when we could have just signed…

Whatever. I clearly don’t understand how PR works.

They didn’t let us do any songs, even though I had brought a guitar, but that was okay. It was a really short segment overall, and they played both Candlelight and Wonderland. The deejay said he would never get sick of Candlelight, ever, even though they’d played it to death when it first charted. That was about the nicest thing I could imagine a Top 40 deejay saying.

In the limo on the way back to the hotel I asked what time soundcheck was. Carynne and Ziggy both laughed at me, and explained it would be at three p.m. on Saturday. At which point I remembered it was Thursday.

They sent me back to my room when we got back to the Penta, and I got back in bed with J., who barely woke up and snuggled me like a teddy bear when I got under the sheet.

When I woke up later, he was sitting up next to me in bed, writing something in one of those fancy journal-type notebooks. I closed my eyes again and listened to the sound of him writing. In the background was the sound of Manhattan traffic, car horns far below us, and the whoosh of the hotel A/C. He was writing with a pencil, which made a scratch-scratch sound on the paper.

Then he stopped. “You’re awake,” he said.

“How can you tell?”

“Because you look like you’re listening.”

“How can you tell that?”

“I dunno. Something about the way your face looks.”

I opened my eyes and looked up. He brushed my hair off my forehead. “You’re really getting to know me,” I said.

“Well, yeah.”

“There’s something kind of miraculous about that.”

“Is there?”

“The whole concept of knowing another person that well.” I tried to explain. “They talk about married couples who have been together forever finishing each other’s sentences, but, you know, I didn’t think I’d ever experience that myself.”

J. looked for a minute like he was about to argue, but then he leaned down and kissed me. “You’re right, it’s miraculous.”

“This is absolutely the most boyfriendy I’ve ever felt,” I told him. “I want you to know that. And saying that made my adrenaline spike, but that’s nothing breakfast won’t fix.”

He smiled. That I could make a person smile was another thing that felt miraculous. “You’ll have to eat it on the way.”

“On the way where?”

“The day sheet that came under the door says you’re due at the BNC offices for something at eleven.”

“No rest for the wicked,” I said and sat up with a sigh. I rubbed my face with my hands. “Where’s the day sheet?”

He had folded it and tucked it into his book. He handed it to me.

I looked at it and groaned. “Why is there so much media in this city? Why? I shouldn’t complain, I know. But still.”

“You didn’t tell me you’re doing Letterman.”

“Wait, we are?” I focused my eyes. “Last I’d heard they were still dicking us around about the schedule and whether Wonderland charted.”

“Someone told me backstage yesterday that it squeaked onto AT40 at number 38.”

“Did it? Yes!” I fell back against my pillow with both arms raised in triumph.

J kissed me. Okay, actually maybe I pulled him down to kiss me. Whatever. There wasn’t time for more than that, though. We got up to get dressed.

“Did I tell you we weren’t even going to put Wonderland in the set?” I asked J. while he was brushing his teeth.

“Oh hoo huh huh,” was all he could say, which I took to mean “no.”

“When we started rehearsals, what, four months ago? Five? We weren’t even planning to play it. But something like one in four AOR stations was playing it instead of Windfall. And Mills got some kind of bug up his ass about it. So BNC paid the entire budget for the video and we crash-did it one day in Boston.”

He had rinsed by then. “I knew you filmed it in one day but didn’t know the backstory.”

“Yeah. We had been pushing for Windfall, and lots of stations picked that, since it’s first on the record, but the rock stations went more for Wonderland, and now they made that the video, the pop stations have followed suit, and now you tell me it cracked the top forty, so, yeah, that’s big.”

I told him a bit more about what a crazy day it had been, and filming the segment at Tower. He reminded me we had an in-store to do tomorrow. I decided I had better bring the guitar everywhere I went. This meant bringing Colin everywhere since there were times when carrying it myself wasn’t going to be practical. And Jonathan was going to tag along, too.

This meant at more than one point in the day me, Ziggy, Jonathan, Colin, and Courtney were all in the same limo. Which mean more than one point in the day when I felt uncomfortably hypocritical and whore-ish at the same time. Which meant more than once that day I questioned why being in a car with three sex partners made me feel that way, and trying to figure out whether I was doing something wrong or if what was wrong was how twisted up I felt about it.

I was too busy to come to any conclusions though.
—